Teacher-led Trauma-informed Professional Learning Communities as Models of Care and Reflective Action

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 4:15 pm - Gold 2
  In Roundtable Session: Teacher Learning While Leading: Identity, Belonging, and Storytelling

Abstract

This two-year critical ethnography explored discourses produced by middle school teachers in a PLC, convened to explore their experiences supporting students with trauma. A grounded analysis of transcripts and interviews revealed that a teacher-led trauma-informed PLC can support teachers through making common struggles visible, exploring tensions and disrupting binaries, and sharing secondary trauma. These processes translated into concrete actions in the classroom, where teachers could be reflective and calm as they encountered students exhibiting behaviors associated with trauma. A trauma-informed PLC allowed teachers time and space to reflect on tensions between exclusionary discipline policies and trauma-informed practices and to respond productively to those tensions within existing institutional constraints. It also served as a model of collaborative action toward equitable outcomes.

Author

• Carly Berwick, Montclair State University